In the July 2015 issue of the Office of Child Support Enforcement's Child Support Report, practitioners can learn about programs and initiatives that help fathers deepen their financial and emotional commitments to their children. Topics include improving compliance, arrears collections, court partnerships, and more.

This Trauma-Informed Organizational Toolkit was created to provide homeless service providers a roadmap for becoming trauma-informed. The Toolkit provides concrete guidelines for modifying practices and policies and ensuring appropriate responses to the needs of families who have experienced traumatic stress.

The federal government allows states to distribute child support payments to TANF participants, rather than retain them for cost recovery, and not count those payments when calculating their TANF benefits, known as a pass-through and disregard policy. States may pass through all child support collected to current TANF families, with federal cost sharing of $100 per month for one child and $200 per month for two or more children. This study analyzes the District of Columbia’s $150 pass-through and disregard policy. Such policies play an important role in benefitting and penalizing TANF families and require training, outreach, and federal cost analyses.

This fact sheet from the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) examines the changing relationship of whether the government or the custodial family is owed child support arrears, and how this influences the financial stability of TANF participants. Child support arrears accrued during periods of TANF received have declined from 51% of total arrears in 2002 to 26% of total arrears in 2013; possible reasons for this decline include increased TANF arrears collection, or decreased number of cases on TANF, or the amount of TANF arrears owed per case. OCSE data collected since 1999 is used to analyze these potential reasons and a possible relationship with the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. Policies that continue to shift the distribution of TANF arrears from the government to families are shown to have a powerful effect on TANF participants’ financial success as well as state revenue.

Previous research has shown that receiving child support not only reduces the chance of families returning to welfare, but that it also reduces child poverty and, on average, accounts for 40% of a low-income family’s income. This study examines the relationship between child support receipt in Maryland and returns to the TANF program. Results show that women who do not receive child support after leaving the program are far more likely to return to welfare; that larger and more consistent child support payments reduce the chances of a family returning to welfare; and that receiving any child support reduces recidivism, though this is less likely for women with lower incomes.

This dataset from the Annie E. Casey Foundation is part of an annual series that assesses child well-being across the United States. It uses an index of 16 indicators to rank states on overall child well-being, economic well-being, education, health, family, and community. In the midst of the country’s economic recovery, in 2015, more families are struggling with economic instability and more children are living in high-poverty neighborhoods. The report and data also review the impact of parents’ education and health on their children’s outcomes.

This blog post highlights the recently released final report on the accomplishments of State Advisory Councils (SAC) on early childhood education and care. SACs were authorized in the Head Start Act of 2007, with a goal of promoting partnerships between Head Start agencies, state and local governments, and the private sector.

Family Rewards 2.0 was launched in July 2011 in the Bronx, New York and Memphis, Tennessee. This report presents early findings on the program’s implementation and families’ receipt of rewards during the first two years. While still offering rewards in the areas of children’s education, family health, and parents’ work, Family Rewards 2.0 has fewer rewards in each domain, offers the education rewards only to high school students, makes the rewards timelier by paying them each month, and includes family guidance.

This policy brief from the Working Poor Families Project highlights the importance of college completion for being successful in the American workforce. By 2020, 65% of jobs will require at least some form of postsecondary education; however, today, only 41% of adults have an associate degree or higher. The brief describes the need for policies to focus not only on academic supports, but on non-academic supports targeted toward low-income community college students, especially student parents and first-generation students. These populations are often faced with financial, developmental, or other non-academic barriers.

The Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) launched the National Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration (CSPED) to test the efficacy of child support-led employment programs. The project, currently in its 3rd year, is a model for the shift in child support to a family-centered, strength-based framework. This fact sheet introduces the demonstration and the model.